Starry Makes Them Laugh

Starry's bedroom looked like the inside of a planetarium. Star charts covered two walls. A telescope sat in the corner - her mum's old one, the one she'd had since university. Her dad's paintings hung everywhere - swirling galaxies, red planets, rings of Saturn in gold and bronze. Above her bed were the words: The universe is bigger than your biggest worry.

Her parents had named her Starry because they loved the stars. Her mum studied them for a living. Her dad painted them. And Starry had grown up somewhere in between - not a scientist, not an artist, just someone who looked up every single night and felt like the sky was the best thing ever.

Saturday market day was her second favorite thing after the stars themselves.

She had her usual spot - a low wall near the corner where she could see everything. Her dad's stall was three rows in, his paintings lined up in a colorful row. The market was loud and bright and smelled like food. Rain was the last thing anyone was expecting.

It arrived suddenly. Not a gentle drizzle. A proper downpour, the kind that means business. No one had time to do anything but react. In about two minutes the whole market went from loud and bright to cold and grey. Vendors pulled down their front curtains and hunched under their stalls. Parents pulled kids close under any shelter they could find. Everyone stood around, damp and fed up, waiting for something to change.

Nothing changed. The rain kept coming.

Well, this was just unacceptable. Starry would not have it. She looked around.

One stall near the corner had a big canopy - dry underneath, room for a few people. She rushed over, getting drenched in the process. Her dad called out, but saw where she was going and let her be. Under the tent were some bins and some flattened cardboard boxes. She picked up a piece of the cardboard then dug around in the bins until she found a marker. She wrote two words in big letters.

FREE JOKES

She propped the sign up under the canopy and stood behind it. At first no one came, but the one little boy who was already drenched from head to toe escaped his mom's grasp and ran over. He looked at the sign. He looked up at her.

"One joke please," he said as if he were just ordering a soft drink.

Starry took a breath and that was when she realized... she didn't know any jokes. Not one. She'd been so confident writing the sign that she hadn't thought this whole thing through. That's ok, she thought. How hard could making up a joke be anyway?

She started the way most jokes she had heard started.

"Knock knock."

"Who's there?" the boy said.

"Alien." She had no idea where this was going.

"Alien who?"

Starry made a face. "...that's actually a great question. Nobody knows."

There was a moment of silence. Then the boy burst out laughing. Starry blinked. Then she smiled. Interesting. A woman with a pushchair wandered over, curious about the laughing.

"I'd like one," she said.

"What do you get," Starry said, with total confidence, "when you cross an astronaut with a chicken?"

The woman raised an eyebrow. "What?"

Starry thought hard. "An... astrochicken."

The kid immediately burst out laughing. So did Starry. The woman didn't at first, but they were laughing so hard she couldn't help herself. She had to laugh too.

More people drifted over, even though it was still raining. Starry kept going. One asked 'What do you call a rock in space?' A rock. It's just a rock. She told one about the difference between the moon and the biscuit. You could eat a biscuit, of course. She started a joke about a comet and forgot where she was going halfway through and just stopped and shrugged, and that got the biggest laugh yet.

She was starting to notice something. The not-knowing was just as funny as the knowing. Maybe funnier. She started leaving punchlines out on purpose, just to see. It kept working.

By the time she got to "Why did the astronaut pack a lunch?" she didn't even try to finish it.

"I don't know actually," she said. "I haven't finished this one."

The crowd absolutely lost it.

Something shifted in the market. People stopped caring about the rain. They were already wet, but now they were smiling too. It happened slowly. A vendor straightened up and started rearranging his display. Then another. Then someone bought something, and then someone else did. The market came back to life - not fully, not perfectly, but enough. Kids stopped whining. People started talking again.

Starry kept going until she was exhausted - out of half-jokes, quarter-jokes, and jokes that were really just questions with no answers.

The crowd thinned as the rain finally eased. Starry found herself alone under the canopy, holding her soggy sign. The letters had run a little in the rain. She hadn't fixed the weather. She hadn't saved anything. She'd just shown up with a marker and a cardboard box and absolutely no punchlines, and somehow that had been enough. She dropped the sign in the bin. Still smiling about the astrochicken.

That was when the clouds broke open above the rooftops. Just a gap - a thin strip of blue in all that grey. Something came through it. Huge and slow and completely silent. Not a plane. It kept coming down until the shape became clear. A spaceship. An actual spaceship. It looked a little like a space shuttle - the kind her mum had posters of, the kind her dad had painted over and over. Right there above her market.

She looked around. No one was left but her and her dad. He was staring up at it just like she was. The ship touched down in the now vacant parking lot. A ramp lowered and a girl stepped out.

She looked at Starry. Starry looked at her.

"Hello there," the girl said. "I saved you a seat."

Starry looked at the ship. Then at the girl. Then at her dad. A spaceship parked at the market. Suddenly it came to her.

"Hey dad," she said. "Why did the spaceship land at the open market?"

Her dad snapped out of it. "What? Oh. Um, ok. Why did the spaceship land at the open market?"

"Free parking on Saturdays," Starry said, smiling.

Her dad laughed. Laughed for real. Now that was a real joke. Her first one.

"Can I go?" she asked. "Not long. Be back before you know it."

"Of course," he answered. "How could I say no?"

She stepped aboard.